The King Years

October 8, 2012
Branch (The Clinton Tapes) selects crucial scenes from his Pulitzer Prize–winning three-volume history, America in the King Years, to capture the turning points of the civil rights era. Covering the period from 1954 to 1968, Branch begins with Martin Luther King Jr.’s first major speech, given during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat and ends with King’s assassination on a hotel balcony in Memphis. In between are vivid vignettes that convey the movement’s growth: Freedom Rides, sit-ins, the murders of the voter registration workers in Mississippi, the bombing of a church in Birmingham, and the marches to Selma, Birmingham, and Washington, where King’s “Dream” speech addressed a quarter of a million people. Branch highlights King’s relationships with major figures, including activist Bob Moses; Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement; J. Edgar Hoover; and King’s collaboration with President Lyndon Johnson on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and their lack of agreement on the escalating war in Vietnam. He also illuminates how the passage of the Civil Rights Act realigned the political parties during the stormy political conventions in 1964. Though King is the central figure, this is not a biography, but rather a compressed narrative history that, despite its brevity, captures the evolution of a decisive period that changed America. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill.